82 M(-Þ f I DARE say that Ht.\ ,. no other natio al }!ï.'! .,, poet presents qUIte C. the san1e problem as - Shakespeare to the , academic critics who study him. Goethe and Dante were great writers by voca- tion: they were responsible and always serious; they were conscious of every- thing they did, and everything they did was done with intention; they were great students and scholars themselves, and so always had something in com- Inon with the professional scholars who were to work over them. _>\nd this was hardly less true of Pushkin. But Shake- speare was not a scholar, or self-con- sciouslya spokesman for his age as Dante and Goethe were; he was not even an "in tellectual." He was what the sports- . 11 " 1 " d h . wrIters ca a natura, an IS career was the career of a playwright who had to appeal to the popular taste. He began by feeding the Inarket with potboilers and patching up other people's plays, and he returned to these trades at the end. In the meantime, he had followed his personal bent by producing some extraordinary tragedies which seem to have got rather beyond the range of the Elizabethan theatre and by allowing even his potboiling comedies to turn sour to such a degree as apparently to become unpalatable to his public. But he dis- played all along toward his craft a rather superior and cavalier attitude which at moments even verged on the cynical- a kind of attitude which a Dante, or a Dostoevsky, could hardly have under- stood. He retires as a serious artist- in "Cymbeline" and "The V\ inter's Tale"-before he has stopped writing, and says farewell to his audience, in "The Tempest," through a delightful and rather thoughtfulinasque. It would perhaps be an exaggeration to say, as ] ohn Jay Chapman did, that Shakespeare regarded the writing of plays as a harmless kind of nonsense. Certainly Shakespeare came to see him- self as Prospero: a powerful and plen- did enchanter. But it .is difficult for the professional scholar to understand the professional playwright; and there is always the danger that a pedant who does come to direct his attention toward the theatrical tradition behind Shake- speare Inay end by attempting to resolve him into terms of mere stage conven- tions. It is equally difficult for the schol- . crItIcs who cannot bear to admit that Falstaff is a rascal and who have at- tempted to prove, for example, that he never behaved like a coward: a school of opinion not hard to confute. Mr. Wilson does occasionally himself fall into another kind of error. He be- longs to the rarer group of critics-of whom A. W. Verrall, the Greek schol- ar, is one of the Inost conspicuous exam- ples-who have themselves a touch of the creative artist, whose virtue is that they seem to wake the text to a new dynamic life by force of their own imag- ination and whose fault is that they sOinetimes read into it new dramas of their own invention. This last is what has happened, I think, in the case 0 f Mr. Wilson's version of the scene after the Gad's Hill robbery, in which Fal- staff boasts of having put to rout a group of assailants whose number increases in the course of the conversation as the boastful mood càrries him a way. Ylr. 'Vilson has convinced himself that thIs passage is not merely a comic "gag" of Shakespeare's not very top vintage- in spite of the fact that these plays, especially "Henry V," are full of crude and implausible jokes-but a particular- ly subtle bit of comedy only to be grasped by the Inost intelligent spectators: Fal- staff has been aware all the tirne, accord- ing to Mr. "'Tilson, that the two men who chased hirn were the Prince and Poins, and, in boasting to them now of his boldness, he is merely playing up to their joke for reasons whIch Mr. Wilson leaves rather unclear. If Falstaff really knew all the time that his antag- onists were the Prince and Poins, then he Inust also have been merely pretend- ing when at Gad's Hill he ran away from them roaring-a sup- position which is surely absurd and which it seems to Ine that Mr. \Vilson rather slips out of facing. And, as it proceeds, I\1r. 'Vilson's story of the af- fair of Prince Henry and Falstaff gets slightly at a tangen t to Shakespeare's. He is excellent in tracing the phases through which Prince Hal and his com- panion pass in the two parts of "Henry IV" (the growing sense of respon- sibility of Hal under pres- sure of his father's im- BOOKS J. Dover Wilson on Falstaff arly critic who has been nourished on the moralistic literature of the English or American nineteenth century to un- derstand a pure enchanter for whom life IS not real and earnest but a dream that must finally fade like the dramas in which he reflects it. Mr. J. Dover 'Vilson, the English scholar, whose stud- ies of "Hamlet" are well known and who has just published a study of "Hen- rv IV" called "The Fortunes of Fa]- staff" (Macmillan), is an exception to both these limitations, and he has criti- cized them with Inuch common sense. A good deal of his recen t book is occupied, in fact, with exposing various errors that derive from these sources; and, though always pleasant to read, it' is thus not always of especial interest to the ordi- nary reader or playgoer who is accus- tomed to getting Shakespeare at first hand and has never been bemused by the atinosphere, so curiously un-Shake- spearean, engendered by the dramatist's commentators. It does not occur to us today to try, as was at one time a critical fashion, to examine the creations of Shakespeare as if they were actual per- sons about whom it would be possible to assemble complete and consistent bi- ographies. I\1r. Wilson shows how very different the development of Falstaff is from even the kind of presentation of character that one gets in a modern novelist who has worked out a dossier in advance. He makes us see how the per- sonality of Falstaff is created as the long play progresses, and how it exists only in terms of this play. Nor is the ordinary admirer of Shakespeare verr likely to ha ve been Inisled by the theory of certain :'.:.::" . :J." .;)ff , J ; : t :.